Death At The Diner (A Moose River Mystery Book 7)

by Jeff Shelby

  She’d been reaching for a pen, a fat, white one decorated with butterflies, and her hand stilled. “The doctor came to see him? While you were there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should've left.” There was definitely a note of accusation in her voice now.

  “I offered,” I said. “Ted said to stay.”

  She shook her head, and not a single strand of her short white hair so much as moved. “Of course he did. Is he alright?”

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  She waited for me to elaborate.

  I didn’t.

  “So what happened then?”

  “I'm not sure that's for me to say,” I told her. “Privacy laws and all.”

  Priscilla rolled her beady little eyes. “Oh, please. I've known Ted for fifteen years. If he let you stay there while the doctor spoke to him, then he's not going to have a problem with you telling me what the diagnosis was.” She smiled, but it was a wolfish one, teeth bared. It was anything but friendly. “Or I can just call him myself and tell him you wouldn't tell me. Cause him a little more stress.”

  She knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't want Ted to suffer through anything more. And she also knew that Ted would absolutely be telling her what had happened. We all knew that. Ted was an open book in the department. In life, really.

  If it would make the day in front of me easier, telling her the little I knew was probably a good thing to do.

  “He was poisoned,” I said.

  Her brow wrinkled. “You mean food poisoning?”

  “No. Poisoned as in someone apparently gave him something that he shouldn't have ingested.”

  She leaned back in her chair. She tapped the white butterfly pen against her chin, thinking. “Are you sure you got that right? You aren't just dreaming that up?”

  “Positive,” I said, doing my best to keep my annoyance at bay. I sat down in the chair across from her. I was tired of standing. “The doctor explained it very clearly. And Ted was utterly baffled.”

  “Not the first time for that,” she muttered. “What kind of poison?”

  “The doctor didn't know yet. They were still running tests.”

  She spun the pen between her fingers, expertly, and I couldn’t decide if she’d picked up that skill twirling a baton or a set of drumsticks.

  “So,” she said, still spinning it between her fingers, “we may have a criminal case then.”

  “I'd think so,” I said. With some effort, I shifted my gaze from her hand back to her face. “Hard to figure how a purposeful poison might've been in whatever he ate or drank unless someone deliberately put it there.”

  “We'll need to figure out who was in that restaurant,” she said. “Compile a list.”

  We. She used the word ‘we.’ My pulse ticked up a notch. She wasn’t excluding me. She was listening to what I had to say, considering my thoughts on the case. This was progress, wasn’t it?

  “I can start one,” I said quickly. “A list, I mean. I was there with my family.”

  Her mouth twisted and the pen stilled. “Hmm. Yes, I forgot about that. You mentioned it last night at the hospital.” She paused and her eyes narrowed as she gazed at me. “Interesting.”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. So much for a united front. “I didn't even speak to him while we were there.”

  She opened her mouth, probably to flat-out accuse me of poisoning Ted, but I stopped her. “But I can tell you who he was having dinner with.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “He was having dinner with someone?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited.

  So did I.

  Yes, I was being juvenile, but sometimes, even when you're an adult, you have to behave like a child in order to make someone squirm a bit after they've been rude to you. I wasn't going to hand her anything. I was going to make her ask for what she wanted.

  She let out a sound that sounded like a cross between a sigh and a growl. “Who was he eating with?”

  I waited a beat. “His girlfriend. Elsa. I don't know her last name.”

  “Ahlberg,” she answered, offering up the last name. “Hmm, interesting. Alright, since you seem to think you know so much, why don't you type me up a list of people you saw in the restaurant? I'll start there.”

  “Okay.” I immediately began searching my memory for the people I’d seen. It wasn’t like she was asking me to dust for fingerprints or do any hard-hitting detective work, but it was something. And I really wanted to figure out what had happened to Ted; not just because it was a mystery that needed to be solved, but also because I considered him a friend.

  “And I'm going to want to talk to Bjorn,” she said. “Can you call down there and see if he's in?”

  “He is. I've already talked to him this morning.”

  She sighed. “Well, of course you have. May I ask why?”

  “I stopped in to pick up my daughter's check,” I explained. “On my way here.”

  “Did he have anything to say?” she asked. “About Ted?”

  “He asked how he was,” I said. “That was about it. He's worried about the restaurant.”

  “He should be,” she said, raising a thin eyebrow. “If people think he choked on a chicken bone or passed out from some rotten salsa, they aren't walking through that door.”

  “I know. But I told him that Ted was recovering and that I was sure he'd let people know it wasn't from the food.”

  She snapped to attention. “You didn't tell him about the poison, did you?”

  “No.”

  She seemed disappointed by that, as if she'd hoped to trap me. “Okay. Well, I'll go talk to him and see what I can find out.” She paused. “What did he say when you told him Ted was okay?”

  “He was glad to hear it,” I told her. “That was really it.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn't expect him to be doing jumping jacks.”

  “Why not? Ted's fine. He should be happy.”

  “Oh, I'm sure he's very happy that no one died in his restaurant,” Priscilla said. “But he and Ted...” Her voice drifted off.

  “He and Ted what?”

  She waved a hand in the air, as if doing so would erase the words she’d just spoken. “Nothing. Just make that list and get it to me as soon as you can.”

  My curiosity had now been properly piqued about the relationship between Bjorn and Ted. Bjorn had reacted a little strangely during our conversation and now Priscilla was definitely holding something back from me. I wondered what it was.

  “Email or hard copy?” I asked.

  “Email,” Priscilla said without looking up. She had a pad of paper in front of her and her fancy white butterfly pen danced across the page as she jotted down notes.

  “I'll do both,” I told her, forcing the fake smile on my face again, just in case she decided to look up. “You know. Just in case you have trouble with the email. Again.”

  EIGHT

  I spent ten minutes putting together the list of names of people I remembered. I wished I’d spent more time surveying the restaurant. I wished I could put names to all of the faces I’d recognized. I somehow didn’t think “tall man with a bird’s nest of a beard and thick bifocals” would be a good substitute for an actual name. I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the end result, but it was all I had, so I emailed it to Priscilla, then printed off a copy and dropped it in her inbox, too. She didn't even glance up from her computer screen when I walked in.

  The rest of the morning was reserved for clearing my inbox, answering phone calls, and putting together a few other projects I'd been handed. Kevin Mahoney, another officer on the force, had stopped by the office for something, and he and I had exchanged friendly greetings. With Ted being gone and Priscilla’s perpetual foul mood, it was nice to see someone without a permanent scowl etched on their face.

  A lot of what I was doing were things that had just been set aside for a long time because they hadn't had an extra set of hands in the office. So I filed, I compiled, and I organize
d. I'm sure most people would've found it boring, but I liked reading through the old files and getting things put together in a way they were easily found.

  Call me old-fashioned.

  I left shortly after Priscilla returned from lunch, a greasy bag clutched in her hand, and was pulling in the driveway just as Jake and the kids were getting out of the minivan. It was perfect pool weather—bright sun, cloudless sky, no humidity—so I was surprised to see them returning so early.

  “Some kid peed in the pool,” Grace said with a frown as she climbed out of the van. Her hair was a wet, tangled mess, her swimsuit still clinging to her small body. “Like stood there in the shallow end and pulled down his suit and just peed!!”

  “So they closed it early,” Sophie said with the same frown and pool-styled hair.

  “Bummer,” I said. I’d heard of pools closing for other body fluid contamination, but never urine. Maybe it was because of the blatant display of urination? “I'm sorry.”

  Will climbed out of the van. “I'm not,” he said. “Pools are gross, anyway.”

  Jake slid out of the driver's seat. He was in his swim trunks, too, paired with a light blue t-shirt. He tanned up the second summer hit, and the blue of his shirt and white trunks made his skin look as brown as chocolate.

  “We didn't feel like waiting around,” he said. He grabbed the bag filled with pool toys and sunscreen. “They were closing it for an hour.”

  I kissed his cheek. “I don't blame you.”

  “I do,” Grace snarled. “Sophie and I wanted to stay.”

  “Yeah, well, too bad,” Will said, pushing past her. “Some of us find swimming in urine to be gross. And you do know that for every kid that gets caught peeing in the pool, there's, like, at least twenty more that already peed and didn't get caught, right?”

  “Eww,” Sophie said, wrinkling her nose. “That's disgusting.”

  “I know,” Will said, nodding. “I know.”

  “He's exaggerating,” I told the girls. “Go inside and get changed.”

  They grumbled and followed Will inside the house.

  “They really closed the pool down for pee?” I asked.

  Jake nodded, grimacing. “I think they had to, uh, after the very public display of contamination. They did their sample collection right away and blew the whistle two minutes later. They said there were high levels of some chemical I can’t even pronounce. Will looked it up and apparently it’s a byproduct of too much urine?” He shuddered.

  I didn’t even want to think about it. “Other than that, how was it?” I asked Jake.

  “Fine,” he said. “Hot. They were having a good time. Will won't admit it, but he was in the water and playing with the girls.”

  I raised my eyebrows, impressed. “I hope you got that on video.”

  He grinned. “All of it. How was your morning?”

  It was my turn to wrinkle my nose. “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  I told him about stopping by Big Mama's and my conversation with Bjorn. I didn't tell him about my interaction with Priscilla because not only did he know that was the norm, it also had the ability to upset him. He didn’t like the contentiousness of our relationship. I didn’t either, but having Jake complain about it would only add more fuel to the fire.

  “Well, I don't blame the guy,” Jake said, leaning against the van. I knew what he was doing: staying outside so we could have an adult conversation in peace. “I'd have the same worries. It's hard for a place to rebound from something like that, especially a food place. Once the reputation goes, it's hard to fix it.”

  “I know. But it seems like it clearly wasn't the food.”

  “Perception is reality, though,” he pointed out. “And if there was truly something nefarious going on, I'm not sure Ted's going to want to let that cat out of the bag. Which makes it even harder to fight against the rumors that might morph out of what happened.” He shook his head. “Bjorn's probably right not to be optimistic.”

  “Don't let Emily hear you say that,” I warned, shaking my head.

  “Don't let me hear what?” Emily said.

  I turned and she was standing on the deck, her hands on her hips. She looked decidedly less zombie-like. Her hair was brushed and straightened, her make-up done. She’d changed out of her pajamas and into a pair of denim shorts and a blousy white t-shirt. She didn’t tan nearly as easily as Jake but there was a healthy glow to her complexion. Or maybe it was the blossoming reaction to the sentence I’d just uttered.

  I waved at her in greeting. “I didn't see you there.”

  “Clearly.” She came down the steps and into the driveway. I saw now that she had shoes on and was carrying her purse. “I'm waiting for Andy to get here. But don't let me hear what?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Mom. You know I'll freak out if you don't tell me now.”

  “She will,” Jake said, nodding. “There will be screaming and crying and yelling.”

  “A lot,” Emily said. “So you probably should tell me because otherwise I'll assume you're, like, dying from some disease or something.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. At least she cared about me.

  “And I might catch it and die, too,” she added. “And that will totally ruin my day.”

  There was the Emily I knew.

  “Well, we wouldn't want that,” I said. I reached in my bag and pulled out her check, handing it to her. “I talked to Bjorn when I picked this up. He's worried that people are going to stay away from the restaurant.”

  “Oh, they already are,” she said, nodding. She folded the check and slipped it into her purse. “It's all over Twitter and Snapchat. People are talking about it like crazy. I tried to tell people that it's fine, but no one's listening.”

  “And that's what he's afraid of,” I said. “Because no customers means no restaurant.”

  “Which means no job,” she said, throwing her hands up. “Which means I'm going to have to find another job, which will probably be impossible.”

  “Forgetting the fact for a moment that we're overlooking a man losing his business,” Jake said. “Why would that be impossible?”

  “Because it is! It will be! Where else can I wait tables in town?”

  “Uh, maybe one of the other dozen restaurants?” I suggested.

  “Yeah, right!” She rolled her eyes. “Like there are any even like Big Mama's. I'll probably have to go work at McDonald's or something. Gross!”

  “As gross as guacamole on your fingers?” Jake asked innocently.

  She shot him a murderous glare. “Grosser.”

  I looked at Jake. “See, there's going to be crying and screaming and yelling, anyway.”

  He nodded. “My error.”

  “And oh my god, they probably won't pay me as much,” she continued, oblivious to us. She was on the downward spiral as she cycled through everything that could possibly go wrong. “And my hours will probably suck and then Andy will get mad and break up with me and I probably won't even be able to afford college and I'll be stuck working at McDonald's forever.” She looked at me. There were tears welling up in her eyes. “What am I gonna do, Mom?”

  I sighed. “Well, right now, I'd suggest maybe going inside and calming down before your boyfriend gets here. Then I'd suggest a couple of deep breaths so that you can realize you just projected the fate of your life based on something that hasn't even happened yet.”

  “But it could!” she cried.

  “And it also could not,” I emphasized. “It most likely will not.”

  “You just don't understand.” She turned and headed back into the house, presumably to pull herself together before her boyfriend got there.

  But I did understand. I understood that my eldest daughter was a bit of a projectionist. I understood that she purposely sought out worst-case scenarios. I understood that the hormones raging through her teenage body made her think and say really ridiculous things.

  I also understood that I didn’t always ha
ve the patience to deal with her.

  “I know what you're thinking,” Jake said. “I can read your mind.”

  “Really?” I folded my arms across my chest. “What am I thinking?” I waited for him to rattle off the psychoanalysis I’d just completed in my head.

  “You're wondering how many more months until she leaves for college.”

  I smiled at him, pitying my poor, ignorant husband. “Shows what you know. That is absolutely not what I was thinking.”

  “What were you thinking then?”

  I headed for the house. “I was wondering how many more days until school starts.”

  NINE

  After a dinner of barbecued chicken, asparagus, and salad, we set out for an evening walk. Jake and I positioned ourselves behind the younger two girls, who were racing ahead on their bikes. Will stayed home to play a computer game and Emily was still out with Andy. Hopefully, he was having better luck keeping her calm than we’d had.

  The air had turned humid, and clouds were threatening to unleash their fury on us as we circled the park.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked Jake. It was a standard question on our nightly walks, usually if we’d walked in silence for more than a few minutes.

  “I was thinking about poison.”

  “I don't think Emily was behaving that badly. I’ve definitely seen worse.”

  Jake chuckled. “Not for her. I meant the poison or whatever it is that was found in Ted.”

  I chuckled, too. “Whew. Good to know you aren’t thinking of offing my firstborn.”

  “Our firstborn,” he corrected, and my stomach somersaulted with love, just like it always did when Jake so fully claimed all of his stepchildren, warts and all.

  “Your first assumption was that someone put the poison in his food,” he said, continuing his line of thinking. “Like it was meant for him. And that was mine, too.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding.

  “But what if it was already in whatever he ate or drank?” he said. “Like, it was in there before it was even cooked or served. Meaning no one even knew it was there. That would truly be accidental and just bad luck on Ted's to have gotten it.”